Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues, is one of public radio's most popular programs. Each week, nearly 5 million people listen to the show's intimate conversations broadcast on more than 624 NPR stations across the country, as well as in Europe on the World Radio Network. In 2015, Fresh Air was the No. 1 most downloaded podcast on iTunes.
Though Fresh Air has been categorized as a "talk show," it hardly fits the mold. Its 1994 Peabody Award citation credits Fresh Air with "probing questions, revelatory interviews and unusual insights." And a variety of top publications count Gross among the country's leading interviewers. The show gives interviews as much time as needed, and complements them with comments from well-known critics and commentators.
Fresh Air is produced at WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and broadcast nationally by NPR
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Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham talks about Trump's impact on democracy. Meacham's latest book is a collection of speeches, letters and other original texts from 1619 to the present.
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Legal scholar Dorothy Roberts reexamines her own family story. Critic David Bianculli recommends TV to watch. Author Heather McGhee says Martin Luther King Jr. would be inspired by today's activism. -
Peplowski, who died Feb. 2, started playing clarinet professionally at age 10 and went on to perform with the Benny Goodman Orchestra and to record on his own. Originally broadcast July 7, 1999.
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Saadiq helped shape modern R&B and soul in Tony! Toni! Toné! and as a solo artist. Now he's up for an Oscar for his song, "I Lied to You" from the film Sinners. Originally broadcast July 8, 2025.
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Emerald Fennell's extravagant adaptation of Emily Brontë's classic cares little for subtlety. Ultimately, this love affair is more photogenic than it is deeply moving. -
Miller joined Fresh Air as an intern in 1978 and retired at the end of 2025. He led the show through many changes, like going national and editing digitally.
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Considered the father of Afrobeat, Kuti used his music in the 1970s to combat colonial values and brutal dictatorship. Podcaster Jad Abumrad tells his story in the series, Fela Kuti: Fear No Man.
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Journalist Vicky Ward first profiled sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. She discusses the fallout from the millions of publicly released documents, and why this story took so long to come out.
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Dorothy Roberts' parents, a white anthropologist and a Black woman from Jamaica, spent years interviewing interracial couples in Chicago. Her memoir draws from their records. -
Rachel Weaver worked for the Forest Service in Alaska where she scaled towering trees to study nature. But in 2006, she woke up and felt like she was being spun in a hurricane. Her memoir is Dizzy.
